what is spooling (Printer Basics)

Spooling is a usefull option if you want to print a large amount of data. This function saves the print jobs to hard disk in a queue before sending them to the printer. Consider spooling as the traffic controller of printing—it keeps all the print jobs from trying to print at the same time.
By default, spooling is enabled in Widows xp.
You can choose two options:
1. start imediate printing
2. Wait until last page is spooled.
An analogy for these choices is the actions you can take in a grocery store’s cashier line. Let’s say you have an entire cart full of groceries and the guy behind you has only a few things. Even if you’ve started loading your groceries onto the belt, as long as the cashier hasn’t started with your items, you can choose to let the person with fewer items go before you, or you can make him wait. If the cashier has already started totaling your groceries, then you don’t have that choice. Windows XP Professional spooling options allow you to configure your print environment similarly.
In the Advanced tab, you can leave the Start Printing Immediately option selected, or you can
choose the Start Printing After Last Page Is Spooled option. If you choose the latter option,
a smaller print job that finishes spooling first will print before your print job, even if your
job started spooling before it did. If you specify Start Printing Immediately, the smaller job will
have to wait until your print job is complete.
The other spooling option is Print Directly to the Printer, which bypasses spooling altogether.
This option doesn’t work well in a multiuser environment where multiple print jobs are sent
to the same device. However, it is useful in troubleshooting printer problems. If you can print to
a print device directly, but you can’t print through the spooler, then you know that your spooler
is corrupt or has other problems.

As I described before, when a user prints a document, the print job creates a temporary file on the disk for the document being printer. After that the application can be used for other tasks and the system sends the temporary file to the print device.
In windows, the print spool service s responsible for managing the print environment. If yo can't delete a print job from the print queue than you many have a corrupt queue.
This problem may be solved by restarting the print spooler services.Follow these steps to perform the task:
1. Go to Start Menu
2. Control Pannel
3. Performance an maintinance
4. Administrator toools
Actually when you restart the printing spool services, you are going to reboot the printing envoiroment.
Sometimes, you may want to move the printer spooler folder. The folder location should be changed if you are facing printing problem in windows and there is no hardware problem. Also if you are running out of space on drive C, spool directroy should be moved to another partition. To change the spool dierctory:
1.Start Menu
2. Printer and Faxes
3. Choose file
4. Server properties
5. Click advance tab
6. Enter the path of the new spool folder